Los Angeles, CA — As bogus news pushing the divisive two-party paradigm about which puppet politician said something stupid this week fills the airwaves, very real news is taking place and conveniently getting glossed over. This very real news involves very real victims — who happen to be innocent children.

This week, a massive operation came to a head that was carried out across southern California which swept up 238 child predators and traffickers — including clergymen attempting to buy a 6-year-old boy.

The mass arrests were not made up of reclusive pedophiles living in their mother’s basements either. In fact, much of the arrests involved high-profile figures throughout the community.

John Reynolds, acting special agent in charge for U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations said that among those arrested were entertainers, community leaders, white-collar professionals and clergy members.

“The incidence of child sexual exploitation has reached staggering proportions,” he said at a news conference.

These are not your typical Internet dwellers looking to prey on children online with images and pornography. These people are willing to cross the globe to purchase children for sex. What this exposes is the very real, elite, and extremely horrific market for children.

In May, Michael Quinn, 33, traveled from Australia to Los Angeles to complete a deal to buy a 6-year-old boy for sex, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

As the Times reports, undercover agents met Quinn on a social media networking site, where he had communicated that he wanted to “meet up with a dad who shares his young one,” according to prosecutors.

“Quinn explained to the undercover agent he was hoping to meet ‘other pervs’ in the U.S. and ultimately agreed to pay a human trafficker $250 to provide him with a young boy with whom he could engage in illicit sex,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

Since its inception in 2014, Operation Broken Heart has increased resources to law enforcement agencies and task forces which have resulted in thousands of arrests. It is one of 61 programs nationwide funded through the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Sadly, the funding for the prevention of child sex trafficking is but a drop in the bucket to the $51 billion spent annually fighting a futile and immoral drug war.

Perhaps, if the US cared more about saving children from exploitation and trafficking, and less about kidnapping, caging, and killing people over arbitrary substances they choose to put into their own bodies, this epidemic level of pedophilia could be curbed.

However, as the Free Thought Project has reported numerous times, many of these sickos hold positions of power within high levels of the government. They have an incentive to protect their operation and can do so using the many corrupt pedophiles within law enforcement as their minions.

In case after case, the Free Thought Project reports on horrifying instances of child sex rings that were allowed to go on for decades because politicians — including heads of states — policemen, clergy, and others were all in on the sick game.

In fact, as the new Netflix series, The Keepers set out to launch an investigation into a murder cold case it soon became much deeper because of the high-level pedophilia it revealed. The story exposed a concerted effort to conceal widespread rape and sexual abuse committed by Keough school chaplain and counselor Father Joseph Maskell, as well as other clergy, police, and a local gynecologist.

On multiple occasions, the Free Thought Project has reported interviews of former child sex trafficking victims who’ve all noted that they had nowhere to go as police and high-level politicians all took part in the abuse.

Hopefully, as the government’s war on drugs continues to crumble, people will wake up to the fact that rescuing a child from a rapist is far more important than catching some dude smoking a plant. Hopefully.